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Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, said the presidential loss could be blamed on a “weak, moderate candidate handpicked by the Beltway elites and the country club establishment wing of the Republican Party.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which opposes abortion rights, told reporters at the National Press Club on Wednesday that Democrats were able to win the so-called war on women because Republicans were ill-prepared or didn’t engage.

“We had a de facto truce on social issues on one side but a full embrace of the war on social issues [on] the other side,” Dannenfelser said. “On abortion, Obama got to completely define what that issue was, and what was it? Rape. Abortion meant rape in the minds of many voters because the debate was not fully engaged.”

In an interview following the press conference, Dannenfelser said that “in almost every demographic,” support for the anti-abortion movement was growing, and the president still lost ground among the female electorate. Republicans, she said, either did not engage on the abortion issue or, when they did, did so poorly.

“If you look at the gender gap, it was a couple of points less for [Obama] than there was last time, so when you are getting 2 points less, that doesn’t sound like a great investment of millions of millions of dollars fighting this war on women,” she said. “We are going to spend morning, noon and night raising money, on the phone doing all we can do so the next time, we can be ready and answer the toughest questions and expose the other guys’ weaknesses. The response was nonexistent this time.”

Still, she said candidates like Mourdock and Akin weren’t helping the cause.

“If at this point, you as a candidate are surprised by a question on abortion on the political stump, you are not worthy to be called a candidate,” she said. “We’re going to look how we endorse and train candidates. From now on, they will not be sent in the field with our support until they know how to talk about the issue.”

Manu Raju contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of female Republican senators.